In 1979 Tascam ignited the home recording market with their revolutionary Portastudio. It gave musicians the ability to make multitracked recordings, using cheap audio cassettes. Bedrooms all over the world were filled by the sounds of a new generation of music producers, taking advantage of this new technology which made it possible for anyone to record music, which had up until this point had been the domain of professionals or dedicated amateurs. Now pretty much anyone could be Brian Eno, The Beatles or Blondie.
In 2004, Apple introduced GarageBand, a mash up of their takeover of Emagic. Teutonic inventors of Logic. So a new generation of artists were recording in their homes, this time using digital technology to make their jams and then share them with the world.
March 2006, and Apple introduce a new, revamped Mac mini; originally seen as the perfect digital hub. It's a mini sized, maxed out Digital Lifestyle provider for your sofa. This latest reincarnation of the Mac mini introduces some new features that make it a great home recording hub too. This is the Portastudio. Reinvented. This is Home Recording. Reinvented.
Mac mini. Reinvented.
The new Mac mini blows away it's predecessor in several important ways when home recording is dragged into the equation. It is, according to it's maker, up to 4 times as fast as the G4 mini it replaces.
Power to the people.
It comes with Intel Core and Core Duo chips. It can hold up to 2GB of RAM on 2 slots; it can be configured with a Serial ATA 120GB HD, which is a reasonable speed and size for home recordists, but hooking up a firewire drive is always a good idea when working with raw audio and visual files.
Audio Ins and Outs
This new Mac mini now has an 1/8th inch stereo analogue input which can also accept a digital input as well as analogue and digital outputs. This is a vast improvement over the previous mini and it also has 4 USB inputs, which is useful for external audio interfaces or USB keyboards.
What is in the Mac mini box?
It comes loaded with iLife '06 including GarageBand and iTunes to help you get creative with your digital audio out of it's tiny little box.
Home recording. Reinvented.
We haven't had the chance of using a Intel Mac mini to make music yet. But the feeling in our stomach is that the Mac mini will be a very desirable, and hence popular entry into the world of audio production, shame that the price has gone up, and when compared to a similar spec Dell, it looks positively a rip off, but Dell's do not come preloaded with GarageBand and Mac OSX Tiger . By bundling GarageBand 3 with evey new Mac mini, chances are more and more people will be turned onto digital audio production using an Apple Mac computer.
Mini Marvel
I am extremely tempted to buy a Mac mini Core Duo to use as my new Portastudio, on paper it spanks my PowerBook G4, which I could still use but now alongside a Mac mini which could be a truly monster music machine when partnered with Logic Pro 7.2, an M Box and USB keyboard. It would have the power for a considerable amount of plug-ins and tracks. Then I could still use my PowerBook as a guitar processor to feed into my Mac mini. Sounds like a pretty pungent recipe for audio flavour to me. Bring it on.
